Another addition to my series of retro computer posts. This time I’m writing about the Atari 2600 Rev A. Jr. made in 1986. Quote from atariage.com:

“The Atari 2600 Jr. was introduced in 1986 with a new ad campaign and a new design for the aging system. This is almost identical to the first edition 2600 Jr. except that the Rainbow on the metal plate is wider. It came in a small silver box, and can also be found in a red box. Once again it has the same functionally as other Atari models, just a difference in appearance.”

I don’t usually find genuine pieces of electronics or antique laptops with a unique design at a local flea market, but my last visit was very much worth it.

This is a genuine piece that I got for 10€ – the dude doesn’t even know what he’s selling, or don’t care. Usually with laptops I’d do a bit of a maintenance like cleaning and replacing a CMOS battery, but this is so simple and in a really good condition that I didn’t have to do anything, except for brushing off dirt.

To my surprise though, this thing was in a full package – PSU, controller and a game cartridge – I mean I was surprised because all of the antique laptops I find don’t have anything else with them. I grabbed this thing right away and ran home to check if it works.Read more

Greetings fellow gamers! Let’s get one thing clear – I play games. Now I don’t play as much as I used to, but when I was a kid I used to play a lot… I didn’t own many consoles, simply because I couldn’t afford swapping consoles often, so I only had a Zhiliton (it’s a brand name of a Chinese clone from NES, these clones are normally called Famicom consoles). After that I owned a PS1, then a PS2, a PSP, then an Xbox360 which I own to this day.

This project, a console emulator packed in a briefcase, was born when me and a friend of mine had some ideas about how it would be cool to play and remember those old games… so I thought about it and started making one of my own.

The whole thing took a really long time (longer than I wanted, over a year) to assemble, but that’s because I ordered some of the things from eBay and AliExpress, and sometimes the packages would not get delivered, so I would need to order more and all that stuff… months of waiting and personal life stuff has delayed this project for a long time, but finally it’s ready to be shown off!Read more

Good day y’all. What a shitty winter this year is, ain’t it? It’s nearly Christmas and there’s absolutely no snow only rain, sadness and depression.
Never the less, to keep myself occupied through this period I try to continue my own projects or make my life easier by writing up some kinda automated scripts. One of which being a MikroTik guest user generator for WebFig v6.38rc7 interface, because I hate thinking up names and random passwords…
You’d think that with version 6 of this software the developers would have made a random user generation feature of some sort and a way to print it out quickly, but nope. There might be a feature that our sysadmin needs to enable, but he can’t be bothered with such crazy tasks, so meh.Read more

Greetings. Christmas is coming and at work we often make something funny/interesting for this period of the year. About last year you can read in a previous post here, although it wasn’t all that interesting.

This year we decided to make some kind of an interactive thing and use the arduinos that we had laying around. So the idea was like this: To make a box that had a camera and 2 push-buttons. One button would play some kinda Christmas music, another button would take a picture through the camera and upload it to our website, where we could display them all.Read more

Yeah, it’s a bit late to post about it now… but end of 2016 is coming, and we have some new awesome things planned how we’ll decorate the office, so this post is to remember how we had decorated last year.
Nothing too fancy, we only did it at the last moment, but everyone liked the result.
We broke out some keyboards, glued their keys to a motherboard and some graphics cards. Found a lot of DDR rams and chained them up into a garland. Some PS2 mouses were painted red and hanged on the office lights.
The best thing was hanged on our door – a wreath made of DDR ram, LED strip, an Arduino motion sensor and a Piezzo buzzer.
The motion sensor would detect whenever someone was walking past our door and trigger an Arduino to play one of the two programmed Christmas melodies through the buzzer. To connect everything we used an ethernet cable. It was fun and simple.Read more

Hello. Today I’m writing about a different version of a powershell utility script I made before for calendar synchronization. See that post for details and bottom of it for a raging update. This is a continued post from before.
That script I made before was for an Exchange server and it was working great at the time. But later we switched to Office365 and since April it became broken in a way that was making me wanna pull my hair out. However thanks to my persistence and a nudge into the right direction from some people just when I was about to give up, I was able to make that script work again, so in turn I made it as a different script and named it v2. The old one can still be found here.Read more

This is my latest project which I, for most part, finished. Its purpose is to log everything that happens user-related in an IRC channel to a configured database. Initially this was made to be used with PISG (the irc log file parser and stats generator) on an EvilZone network (your mileage may vary) and it was for some time. But now EZ has transitioned into new era and it needed to be re-designed. So this is the final product which can be found on my github: https://github.com/kulverstukas1/EvilLogBot
This bot is very simple, it takes no user input through IRC and gives no output on IRC, ignores all queries – it only logs user actions, like PING timeout, kick, ban, join, part, etc. It has however some features – ignore (to ignore certain nicknames) and logrotate (to delete logs older than defined days and keep your DB clean).
Before using it you must configure to your own needs, and it’s done simply.Read more

Hello. Let’s say you have a large sum of computers in your organization that are connected to a domain and some of those computers could be turned off for the night (library, computer class, etc.), because after using them not everyone turns them off and they are kept powered on through the night. That bothers me because ~50 computers are wasting energy! and so I came up with a powershell script that powers off the selected computers at a schedule, in my case I set it to run at 19:00 every day.
After letting it run for a couple of weeks, I think it seems to be working pretty well… You have to configure it though, by adding computer names with their full domain name and their MAC addresses in the array and that’s it. Log file is created at the location you specify (C:\ now) with computers that were shut down.
Script can be found in my project folder here.

Part of our employee synchronization from employee database to our AD is setting an out-of-office message in Office365 when the user gets disabled (to send a notice that the user no longer works here to whoever sends that person an email), and removing the message when that same person comes back to work. For this, I made a powershell script (damn, I love powershell) that lists all disabled users in our AD and goes through everyone checking if it has a message set up, if not then it sets one.